It's not per se madness; companies pay much more than that for code. Instead it's an empirical question about whether they're getting that value from the code.

The difference is that if those companies were to rely only on the AI part, and hence to transform us (computer programmers) only in copy-pasters and less, in about one to two years the "reasoning" behind the latest AI models would have become stale, i.e. because of no new human input. So good luck with that.

But my comment was not about companies, it was just about writing code, about the freedom that used to come from it, about the agency that we used to have. There's no agency and no freedom left when you start paying that much money in order to write code. I guess that can work for some companies, but for sure it won't work for computer programmers as actual human beings (and imo this blog-post itself tries to touch on that aspect).